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Afghanistan on President Obama's NATO agenda

President Obama will ask allies to stay the course despite growing impatience across Europe. |
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Because of the lingering uncertainty about the success of the Petraeus strategy, Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations said the U.S. is shifting the summit’s focus away from military strategy and toward efforts to prepare the Afghan government to take primary responsibility for security across the country by 2014.

“We are viewing the Lisbon summit as a strategic milestone for the ongoing mission in Afghanistan,” Ivo Daalder, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday.

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According to NATO, there are currently about 131,000 coalition troops in Afghanistan, with the U.S. making up more than 100,000 of that total. And, analysts note, some allies are assigned to quiet parts of the country where attacks on coalition troops are rare.

U.S. officials hailed a pre-summit announcement by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper that Canada will deploy up to 950 military trainers in Afghanistan through 2014, helping NATO cover a shortfall it has been begging for help with for more than a year.

Still, Harper is standing by plans to withdraw Canadian combat forces from Afghanistan next year and he said Tuesday that the withdrawal could be complete well before July 2011—the date Obama has set for the beginning of a withdrawal of U.S. forces. The Canadian withdrawal comes on the heels of a pullout in August by nearly 2000 Dutch combat troops.

Indeed, Obama’s call for a staged U.S. withdrawal beginning next July makes it virtually impossible to obtain increases in combat support from U.S. allies.

“No ally is going to make a major new commitment if it believes the U.S. is planning to reduce its commitment,” Volker said. “The administration knows this, and so is not asking for major new commitments. They will want trainers and aid to help sustain the kind of operations that lie ahead.”

On the eve of the NATO summit, many European analysts see NATO as lacking in focus and purpose, particularly since terrorism emerged as the major threat to U.S. national security. “Europe is no longer the first line of defense for the U.S.,” analyst Dominique Moisi wrote last month in the French newspaper Les Echos. In an article titled “the Atlantic Alliance in Autumn,” Moisi suggested that economic malaise and other factors are causing Europe to lose interest in NATO and the continent’s bonds with the U.S.

At the meeting, NATO plans to adopt a “strategic concept” to govern the alliance for the next decade. The alliance, which was born out of World War II suffered an identity crisis when the Cold War ended and suffered further from tensions created when the U.S. and a handful of other allies went to war in Iraq without NATO’s consent.

NATO should totally ignore anything Obama says. He no longer has the backing of his own people. He was supose to end these wars instead he is tring to drag other countires down with him. Waste their treasure and young lives on a war that will not be won. How foolish is that ? The World is starting to see Obama for what he is, a FAILURE.

Americans want to stop the tragic hemorrhaging of American blood and treasure in Afghanistan. In his speech March 27, 2009, Obama said our mission in Afghanistan was to disrupt, dismantle, and defeatal Qaeda. There are only a handful of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, and al Qaeda has now spread all over the world.

Stationing of US troops in a nation guarantees that no rogue government comes into power. It has worked in Japan, Germany, and South Korea and it will work in Afghanistan. Fifty thousand US troops stationed in Tehran will paste smiles on the faces of angry Iranian leaders. No nation should be allowed to threaten world order and the job of maintaining its stability is given to US troops.